I didn’t do as careful a job tracking the books I read this year as I did last year, but I think the below covers it (they’re listed more or less in the order I read them — I sometimes read more than one at a time). The list is about as long as last year’s; it seems that these days I read only 22 or so books a year. I used to read many more books each year, but I guess that was back when I didn’t have papers to grade or an online magazine to run or a child to play with. I hope next year the list will be a good deal shorter, since that would mean I’m spending more time writing my new novel in 2009 — I tend not to read fiction when I’m writing it.

Anyway, I hope your 2008 in books was a good one, and I’d be interested to hear what you thought about any of the below, if you read any of them (most of them are not new books). And do you keep track of what you read each year? I just started doing that the last couple of years. Since I’m asking questions, what was the best book you read in 2008? The worst? 

One of the below was really, really, bad; a few were not very good; a few were disappointing; a few were relatively painless and easy to get through, if unremarkable; a few were interesting enough even if not as good as they’d been hyped up to be or even if flawed in some major way; and a few were memorable and well worth reading. How’s that for specificity?

1. The Ladies of Grace Adieu, stories by Susanna Clarke

2. I, The Jury, a novel by Mickey Spillane (I wrote about it here)

3. Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

4. Boomsday, a novel by Christopher Buckley

5. The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

6. The Kite Runner, a novel by Khaled Hosseini

7. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang (I wrote about it here)

8. The Thirteenth Tale, a novel by Diane Setterfield

9. The Godwulf Manuscript, a novel by Robert B. Parker

10. How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker

11. The Tyranny of Good Intentions, by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton (I wrote about it here)

12. Everything Bad is Good for You, by Steven Johnson

13. The Big Sleep, a novel by Raymond Chandler

14. Enter Jeeves: 15 Early Stories, by P.G. Wodehouse

15. Gutenberg: How One Man Remade the World with Words, by John Man

16. Hyperspace, by Michio Kaku

17. The Time Machine, a novel by H.G. Wells

18. Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace

19. V for Vendetta, a graphic novel by Alan Moore

20. Freedom Evolves, by Daniel C. Dennett

21. The Misanthrope, by Moliere

22. The Bourne Identity, a novel by Robert Ludlum

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